


calling the ghost a ghost

by ryyves



Category: King Falls AM (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Set between 44 and 45
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-16
Updated: 2020-06-16
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:22:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24739171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryyves/pseuds/ryyves
Summary: Emily returns and Jack is still a ghost.or: Sammy in the wake of Emily's return.
Relationships: Sammy Stevens & Ben Arnold, Sammy Stevens & Emily Potter, Sammy Stevens/Jack Wright (mentioned)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 43





	calling the ghost a ghost

**Author's Note:**

> I was lazy about editing this but I really wanted to post it as soon as I could.

After the hotline goes dead, Sammy pulls on his coat slowly, motion by motion. The empty studio grows emptier by increments. Ben’s side of the soundboard is deeper in shadow than Sammy remembers it ever being, and colder. The chattering of Sammy’s teeth catches in his conscious mind and his mind says _coat,_ but then he’s burning. He sits with dead air after Ben hangs up while the minute hand on his watch tips over like a waterfall, the phone lines lit up like red eyes, like eyes red from crying at night. His breathing is louder than anything. San Andreas could shake and he still wouldn’t hear anything other than his breath, the erratic in-out, his chest tight.

“I’m sorry, King Falls,” Sammy says from very far away, and ends the broadcast. He says, to the empty studio, to an audience of blank walls and his own fingers, “You heard our story, and that’s… that’s all I have.”

Something is still echoing in the studio: his finger on the mic, the buttons on the soundboard compressing, his breath. The tremor of his blood. When he puts the headphones down and goes to the door, he hears the wind outside, February-fierce, like the storm was waiting for Emily Potter to break. To break.

Oh.

Waiting for Ben Arnold, then.

It echoes something in him, some tiny ringing, some siren-call of his own swan-dive.

The mic is off. He can say it. He can give himself a moment with his guard down, with no one here to see.

Instead, he closes his eyes and runs through the night’s events, the hurricane Ben dragged him through to get him to this: a pyramid whirling through a rainbow sky, a cornfield greyed by the predawn and half a dozen bodies, his friends, bargaining with the sky.

So maybe, whatever comes, he will always hear it one phone call too late, too far away. Maybe he will always be left with the space between his hands. Maybe there was a reason Emily opened here eyes, there amid broken cornstalks digging into her shoulders, and maybe that reason was that Sammy Stevens wasn’t there.

So what? He still has his friends, this time, and that has to be enough. He has more of his friends than he woke up with, even if he does not know, yet, if Emily has forgotten him too.

He turns his phone on and leaves it face-up when he rises. The drive-time act will arrive soon, but he has a few minutes, and he needs to fill every one of them with silence.

Sammy can say it, but he doesn’t. He goes into the grimy bathroom, barely big enough for a body between sink and toilet, and splashes his face. Takes his hair down and runs cold water through it until he’s shivering. Lifting the hand towel, he runs it through his hair. His skull throbs, and his heart, quietly, taps out a name in Morse.

Say it, coward, he says to himself. And then he says aloud, “Fucking say it, coward.”

His reflection, made haggard by the old yellow light, looks back with stubborn eyes, its hair dripping onto its shoulders but Sammy not feeling it. It shakes its head. Dark lakes blossom on his collarbone, where his coat slips off his shoulders.

“Shut up,” he tells his reflection.

Sammy props open the front door so he can hear if Ben comes up the mountain, the roar of his engine a siren in its own right, his own personal Charybdis. It’s still dark out, the sky resiting the slow pull toward summer, and even through his coat, Sammy feels its sharp breeze. The wind rustles papers in the offices, makes the front door creak. He doesn’t stare out for too long.

He cracks every joint in his body in quick succession and goes back into the studio to consider the night’s tape. Debbie running back on everything she’d told them, Debbie’s voice lightfooted with lies, Debbie promising the end of the world in Emily Potter. An abrupt slide, a sideways cataclysm. Ben saying, _I need you to record this._ Cronkite, then, content not just to make history but to immortalize it. But to prove to himself that he did it, as though maybe, under it all, he wasn’t quite sure that he could.

They’re not that different, in that regard, Ben and Sammy.

 _Who are you?_ says Emily, her voice half-forgotten, her voice the sort of relic a museum curator would die for.

Sammy sets the tape to record the next day, the way he always sets up a new tape when Ben is boiling with energy and too impatient to linger around the studio, but he does it with his eyes closed. What’s one more betrayal between friends?

He puts the equipment back the way he found it, easier since he only has one side to tidy up. Ben has never enjoyed the housekeeping of an on-air personality, but Sammy is tired enough that he takes care of it anyway.

In the office, Sammy packs his things. He shuts the studio door carefully, then double checks through the window that everything is in its place. He zips his coat. It’s cold and empty inside the studio and out, and a ghost is only a ghost if he wants it to be. It all feels, disconcertingly, like a suicide. But if you’re given a lake, you might as well jump in. If you’re given a moon, you might as well bare your teeth.

 _Go out there and show them a storm,_ he tells himself. _Give them that smile._ Somewhere his voice is immortalized with that smile in it, from a studio bigger than this one with glass and no one there to give him a thumbs up, tongue on his teeth. Somewhere he is saying, _I’m Shotgun Sammy, and I have a very special show prepared for you…_ Somewhere no one knows his producer is anything but sick, then anything but run away, then anything but gone.

“I wish you were here,” he says at last. His voice doesn’t catch, but it doesn’t sound like his, either. The night sky is so big he doesn’t want to step into it, his feet heavy in worn shoes.

The snow has long faded from January’s last snowstorm, the snowbank outside his apartment complex knee-deep, the kind of snow he dreamed about as a kid in California but still found unsettling in King Falls. The brittle grasses are beginning to straighten up. The nights are warm enough that they don’t leave frost across the dirt lot, but still biting, and a low, heavy moon hangs above the treetops. Sammy locks the station and shoves his hands into his pockets. His feet crunch on stones.

In his car, he sits in the cold for a long time before he works up the energy to turn on the ignition, and then he sits for longer while the heating turns up, deciding where to go. Every place in this town is both a place and a grave, and he’s given Ben the shovel.

Sammy drives to Ben’s place. The town he passes through is busy with lights, not the waking-up kind but the up-all-night variety, and it leaves Sammy uneasy, the heat on and goosebumps under his coat. Ben lives on the second floor of a small wooden building, its lot big enough for eight cars and Ben’s absent. Sammy pulls into a vacant spot but keeps the headlights on, searching for movement in the open-air stairwell. A few windows have lights, fading in prominence as dawn claws at the evergreens, but not Ben’s place.

Sammy idles in the car and checks his phone. A few missed calls from Troy, nothing from Ben. For a while, Sammy contemplates calling Troy back, but he can’t imagine a version of the night where Troy didn’t personally drive Emily to the hospital. Where Troy isn’t still driving Emily to the hospital, several towns away, his lights flashing down Route 72 like a halfhearted imitation of the lights that brought Emily home, and took her, too. Through the trees, a pale orange light falls in strips across the lot, not high enough to touch Sammy’s eyes or warm him, but enough to promise. _To promise what?_ That some day he’d run out of days, he supposes. That every new day is another bone without marrow, a house without corners, a heart with no heart waiting for his.

Instead, he texts Ben: _You doing ok? I’m game for Rose’s if you’re still up for it._

Eventually, if only because the combination of boredom and stuffy car heating is unbearable for more than half an hour, Sammy gets out and climbs the outdoor stairwell to Ben’s door. It’s plain, just a brass number below the peephole and a pile of old letters stuffed underneath.

There is no one in, but Sammy rings the doorbell anyway, because it doesn’t feel right to wait on the doorstep without announcing himself. Or that if he doesn’t maintain propriety, he’d have to admit the ghost to himself.

The ghost comes to the door. The ghost slides both locks open and lets Sammy in, a horrible ghost grin on its angular face. The ghost touches Sammy’s chest, its nails short, and Sammy turns away from the door.

Sammy sighs. Ben might be a long time coming. He might not come home at all, the way he had not long after Emily disappeared, his mother and the whole town anxious, but Sammy would wait until he did. He can’t leave Ben with a day crueler than the night, the sun headache-bright and farther away than anything, his hands unfamiliar in a new kind of loss, even though Sammy can’t tell Ben, yet, that he understands.

The only person Sammy had wanted waiting for him outside his door had told him, _You’ve had your time to talk, Stevens, and I’m done listening._

So he waits. He listens. The wind slides through his hair like barbed wire, caresses his neck like a lover. Oh. Wishing he had a hat and a scarf, he sits down on the apartment steps and turns his phone over in his hands. He rests his head against the wall and closes his eyes, aware of every winter molar against his cheek, while the sun rises.

After a long, long time, Sammy hears footsteps. The sun is warm through his eyelids.

Someone clears their throat. “Sammy.” It’s not a question; it’s resigned, heavy.

“Ben,” says Sammy. “I figured you’d be at the hospital.” He rubs his face with frigid hands and shivers.

A few steps below Sammy, Ben stands with his hands deep in his pockets and his face plain and raw in the gut-lurching way Sammy has seen too often. He looks at Sammy with that hooded winter look in his eyes and says, “Look, I appreciate the gesture, but I can’t.”

“I’m not leaving you alone,” says Sammy. His voice is steady. He stretches his legs out to rise, but the panic that washes across Ben’s face stops him.

“I’m not family,” says Ben miserably. “I couldn’t see her at the hospital, and it doesn’t matter anyway. She doesn’t want to see me.”

“Ben.”

“And that’s okay. It has to be okay.” Their breaths fog the air between them, hang like diamonds. The sun brushes the back of Ben’s head, framing his curls with a halo, his shadow falling perfectly across Sammy’s face. The world reminding Sammy, over and over, that Ben Arnold is a hero, and Sammy Stevens is a man with nothing but space between his hands.

“I mean, she’s alive, right? That’s better than — I don’t mean, the bar was pretty goddamn low but we couldn’t count on anything. You know?”

Sammy says, “I do. Look, why don’t we go inside. It’s cold, and you’re tired.”

“Yeah, okay,” says Ben, and pulls the keys out of his hoodie pocket. His hand shudders and he misses the keyhole again and again, but Sammy doesn’t rise until the door creaks open, and Ben doesn’t say anything. Sammy follows Ben into his apartment and turns on the lights: the front hallway, the kitchen. Neither of them take off their shoes.

In the kitchen, just off the front hallway, Ben slumps at the table while Sammy brews tea. Ben doesn’t have many varieties, but Sammy brought a box over after discovering that Ben’s beverage of choice for a movie night was a liter bottle of Coca-Cola. If Ben had been desperate to speak on the stairs, he now mumbles so softly that Sammy can barely identify consonants.

Sammy helps Ben out of his coat, slick with sweat. Ben’s shirt must have once been green, but is now the color of a moonless midnight, so Sammy instructs Ben to remove that, too. Bare, his chest is darker, dried sweat like veins across his skin. Sammy looks without looking. There are goosebumps all over Ben’s flesh, the swell of his arms smooth as he presses his palms against his forehead. Sammy hands Ben the kitchen rag, and Ben stares at it for so long that Sammy takes it back.

“I’m going to dry some of this sweat off you,” Sammy informs him. “Then you’re going to drink some tea, then you can take a shower.”

If only Sammy had had someone to walk him through it, the direction to point his feet, the steps to take. A glass of water. An outfit of any clothes he could find in his wardrobe. A phone call, and then another.

Though this is the second time for Ben. Sammy supposes, wryly, that Ben knows this dance better than anyone. And he’s proof that it never gets easier. That imagining a shining man with shining arms opened to Sammy while the dark falls away behind him is less than a dream.

Despite Sammy’s warning, Ben flinches when the kitchen towel touches his shoulders, and Sammy flinches too. Sammy dries his back, then Ben leans back to let Sammy dry his neck and chest. Under his hands, Sammy can feel Ben’s breath, a frightened animal in the cage of his chest. Ben is so small, suddenly, a frightened animal himself, his shoulders rising in mountainous increments.

“It’ll be okay,” says Sammy.

Ben hiccups, a wounded sound. Sammy wonders if he’d been crying in his car, that long, winding drive home. If he’d pulled off on some pine-obscured off-road and sobbed against the steering wheel until Emily’s voice began to feel less like a knife and more like the memory of a knife.

“It’ll be okay,” Sammy says, with more conviction. He has never known anything to be okay in all his life, except this. Except Ben.

“Yeah,” says Ben, with a shaky laugh. “It’ll be just peachy.” Sammy has heard that laugh on his own teeth too many times to remember where it began, his whole life a series of open-window escapes, block laps while someone fumed in the kitchen and no matter where he walked, his feet were still his feet.

When Sammy sets Ben’s tea in front of him, he sees an old, familiar expression of bitterness on Ben’s face, and a deeper look of exhaustion.

“Do you want to talk?” Sammy prompts, sliding into the opposite chair. Ben blows on his tea like a little kid; he lifts the tea bag string and swirls the herbs around; but he doesn’t drink. His lip is trembling too much.

“Not really,” says Ben finally.

The ghost puts its fingers on Ben’s shoulders. Ben shivers and lifts an arm to rub the back of his neck.

Sammy says, “Do you want me to stay?”

And Ben’s voice breaks in a sob, his face open as a split mirror.

* * *

That night, Debbie’s voice follows Sammy from dream to dream. Maybe they are all the same dream. In one, the street Sammy walks down is the King Falls Main Street, suspended in the dusk-green haze particular to mountain towns. It winds around him like a lake, like an ocean broken with waves, like an unknown vehicle broken in two, sizzling, reaching its pyramid arms toward the stars. He wobbles, seasick, his throat heavy. He doesn’t know which way to go, but in dreams you have to go somewhere. The voice swells like tinnitus in the back of his head, like the migraines he sometimes gets and takes pills for, wordless while his feet take him to the lake shore.

But the lake is a black hole, a solid expanse dragging in trees from their tips, the bait shop just a crater, the birds overhead tumbling with their wings spread. He doesn’t think to be afraid, even though the world looks like negative-light photography, all the green washed out and into the lake. He doesn’t think to dig his feet into the soil, or he does but the soil dissolves beneath him.

Sammy tips in, too.

He stands in the dark and hears fabric rustling on skin, hears teeth chattering, feels body warmth and then nothing. He has a dream-sense that his body is not where he thinks it is.

The voice says, _Unwritten, unwritten,_ while Sammy stumbles onto the flat asphalt in front of his Tampa apartment. In the dream, he doesn’t need time to adjust to the light. His bones are colder than the sea breeze, with its heavy scent of fish, hot tar, bodies sweaty and slick all around the year. The air shimmers, a child’s soap bubble set to pop. Boys on skateboards speed straight through Sammy.

When Sammy looks up at his building, he catches a dark figure on the walled-in porch, resting its elbows on the stucco and its chin on its palms, its eyes bright even four stories away, staring at the sea. _Jack,_ says Sammy, only he doesn’t say it with his mouth at all.

The figure turns, its eyes blank and white.

And then Sammy is not anything in the light.

Nothing in the dreams says _Debbie,_ but when Sammy wakes with goosebumps all over his body, he knows. Sun pours around the heavy curtains, afternoon-orange, hours to go before he needs to rise for work. Anticipating a headache, Sammy shuts his eyes and buries his face in the pillow.

After a while, Sammy pushes the covers back from his head. He reaches up a hand and watches the shadows of his fingers curl into a fist. He half expects a hand to reach out and cover his. His bones ache from writhing in sleep.

He lays in bed for ten minutes with his eyes closed before deciding to wait this one out. In his pajamas, an old blanket thrown around his shoulders, he makes his way into the kitchen and measures out coffee. He pushes the kitchen window a few inches up, despite winter, and sits beside it at the table while the coffee maker hums in its own voice, the blanket pulled so close around his shoulders he can barely move.

Though the apartment is cramped, three rooms and a hall closet for laundry, it feels bigger and emptier even than when he first stepped inside.

Halfway through his first mug, the drying sweat on his body catches up to him. Coffee sloshes onto his knee and he curses, softly. It echoes in the kitchen; the wind mocks it back at him, so he pulls the window shut.

He wonders if Ben’s sleeping. He wonders if he should call. A good friend would, Sammy decides. A real friend. But there are too many ghosts in his voicemails, and he’s so tired, and he doesn’t know how to be the friend Ben needs.

Instead, Sammy puts his pajamas and the clothes from the night before in the washer and takes a long, hot shower. He keeps his eyes closed. He doesn’t want to see his body: the curl of dark blond hairs across his chest, the swell of his shoulders gone soft without Jack to remind him to exercise, his thighs crossed with old scars.

Sammy picks up his phone on his way back to the kitchen, hair damp and hanging in puddles past his shoulders. Despite the closed window, the room has filled up with cold air, and Sammy shudders. One taste of his coffee proves it’s gone cold, so he microwaves it, tapping his fingers against the counter. It’s too quiet but he can’t imagine filling it. He pops the microwave a second before its alarm blares, letting out a sharp breath of relief.

Because he’s decided to call Ben, he juggles mug and phone between his two hands, too ill-at-ease to sit down and the caffeine thrumming through him like a song. His breath comes out heavy, reminding him that he is alive. He finds Ben’s number with his left hand, dropping more coffee onto the tile as he puts the phone to his ear.

Ben doesn’t pick up. The phone goes abruptly silent after three rings, which means Ben does not want to talk to him.

“Yeah,” says Sammy roughly to the fridge, his chest a stinging kind of heavy. “I know the feeling.”

There is another number that goes to voicemail every time Sammy calls it, and Sammy calls it every couple of months, just to hear the smile in Jack’s voice. There is a part of Sammy terrified that he will wake up some morning with his head emptied of Jack’s voice, of Jack’s brown eyes warm as churned sand, that Jack’s phone will finally have been disconnected and all Sammy will have left are scraps of Jack’s belongings in the closet and the name, and Jack still not coming home.

Sammy still has Ben’s voice in his ears, the way it broke when Ben saw Emily amid the fire and the wreck of a great metal predator, the joy and disbelief and fear. Sammy should have been there, should have been someone to hold Ben when he retreated from Emily’s side, when the field became a mountain to crawl up backwards. He should have been there to say, _It’s okay, it’s okay, I know._ But he doesn’t know and it’s not okay, and he is running out of ways to justify the sting of panic in his ribcage with Emily in a hospital miles from here, breathing.

He tries Ben’s number again, and gets the same response. A few seconds later, a text comes in: _srry man, i need some time to process it all, u kno? swear i’m not ignoring u._

 _No worries,_ Sammy responds. _I can’t imagine what you’re trying to deal with. Do what you need to._

_u know where to find me._

By then Sammy has to microwave the coffee again, half left in the mug. It tastes stale but he drinks it all down. The kitchen doesn’t look like a kitchen, but a room reduced to its parts: the fridge, blocky, humming; the window cold and a slight flurry pushing past; the table an amalgamation of colt limbs; his hands. An empty space.

Sammy sighs.

He says to the empty space, to the ghost, voice wistful and warm and just a hint bitter, “At least now we know there’s someone out here who can do the impossible for love, huh? Could have been us today.”

But the ghost doesn’t talk back.

* * *

Ben is already in the studio when Sammy comes in that evening, spinning his chair with his headphones over one ear. The bags under his eyes are a perfect black against his skin, and his eyes are a perfect black too. He wears a rumpled red t-shirt under his rumpled black hoodie, and smells like he’d slept in them.

“Hey. You okay?” Sammy mouths.

Ben looks at him blankly, then slowly rubs a hand down his face.

“Coffee?” says Sammy, and hands Ben a travel mug. Ben takes it, his eyes flicking, just for a second, from Sammy’s hand to his face. His lips don’t twitch; not to smile, not to speak.

Sammy takes his coat off and falls into his chair. He has a better view of Ben from here: curly hair in unbrushed tangles around his ears, fingernails bitten ragged, shoulders smaller than Sammy has ever seen them.

For most of the first hour and a half, Ben is quiet, looking past Sammy to the blank wall. He doesn’t press any of the buttons. Over the soundboards, Sammy studies Ben’s hands drumming across the table, shaking. When Sammy talks, even to Ben, it doesn’t register on Ben’s face. The space behind Ben’s eyes is a white void.

Is this what Sammy looked like, on the steps of an LAPD office with Jack’s cold duffel bag held against his chest like a body, not crying but not really looking at anyone either, because nobody was the one person he needed to see? Trembling from his fingernails to the soles of his feet. Color drained away from Los Angeles like a clear prism in reverse, the parking lot darker than the sea.

Okay, so he’s drowning. So he’s looking into his own face on the face of his best friend, the clear and helpless panic he’s never been able to see a future past.

“Ben, why don’t you go home?” Sammy says at last.

“What?” says Ben.

“I said, maybe you should take the day off. I’m happy to cover for you.”

Ben’s eyes get big, and his voice goes ragged. “What would I do with a day off? I can’t stop thinking about her, Sammy.”

“Anything you want, Ben. Watch some Netflix. Listen to some music, check the news, keep your eye on your phone in case Troy sends you anything.”

Ben rests his elbows on the table and drops his head into his palms, unruly hair falling over his forearms. His voice is muffled. “You’ll hate me, but I have my phone on right now for that very reason.”

“What?” says Sammy. “Hate you? I could never.”

“Yeah,” says Ben. “I bet you think I’m a big hero.”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

“Please don’t.”

Sammy’s voice conveys his shock, although in a moment’s hindsight, he shouldn’t be surprised by Ben’s self-deprecation. How many months did Sammy ask himself if he chased the man out the door, if he asked for too much too soon, if Jack’s withdrawal and subsequent departure were Sammy’s fault? “Why not? You did the impossible. You changed the fucking stars, man. This whole town, we’ve been hanging on your every word for months about this, and you pulled it off.”

“I know, Sammy, and I’ve been telling myself to be _happy,_ I’ve been telling myself it’s enough, all day. She’s alive, and that’s—” He swallows. “That’s the only thing that matters. But heroic act of vampiric ray gun aside, I can’t shake the feeling that at the end of the day, I did this.”

Silence slips like a thread through the needle-eye of Sammy’s breath. Even his heart goes quiet. The room pulses, expands and shrinks in closer.

“You didn’t,” he says, and his voice sounds thick and bewildered.

“Maybe I did,” says Ben wildly. “Maybe they knew I was trying to get her back. Think about it, man. She knew Troy.”

“Slow down.” Sammy wishes he could put a hand on Ben’s shoulders, held tightly around his ears, his fingers in fists beside the board. He’s shivering.

“It was just me she forgot.”

“You don’t know that yet. We don’t know anything about what… not to be crass, but what happened to her up there. But you didn’t do this,” says Sammy. The distance between their chairs devours, microphones picking up their voices as if underwater. “You can’t have counted on aliens erasing anybody’s memory — nobody could have.”

“I should have considered every possibility,” Ben says miserably. “I tried to consider every possibility. Lot of good that did me. I nearly lost you, and now I — now I _did_ lose her, all over again.”

Sammy measures his voice. He speaks, firmly, before he can talk himself out of it. “You couldn’t have anticipated anything like it. It was a big unknown. A big white question mark. All you had to go off was what happened with Tim, and while I don’t know everything, clearly it’s not the same.”

Ben shakes his head, his eyes shut. “Please stop trying to console me.”

The on-air sign glows steadily, like a lighthouse Ben keeps swimming away from. Sammy sighs. He knows the desire to dash himself on the rocks, to turn himself into a shipwreck. Ben looks at his microphone, looks at his lap, looks anywhere but at Sammy. Hundreds of people could be listening, their breaths mingled with Sammy’s in the radio waves, and they become the space between Sammy and Ben.

Sammy says, “Not until you realize what you did. You pulled off a goddamn miracle, Ben Arnold, and Emily will know that. The whole town knows that. You hear me? She’ll know.”

“You know, you’re right,” says Ben. “I think I am going to go home.”

Just like that, Ben switches off his mic and sets his headphones down. His chair squeaks as he rises, his eyes that awful black. He leaves the travel mug on the table.

“Ben,” says Sammy.

“Thank you, Sammy,” says Ben, faint through Sammy’s headphones.

The studio door swings shut behind Ben, leaving Sammy with the silence inside his headphones and the phone lines dropping quicker than he can move his hands. He clears his throat.

“Well, then, ladies and gentlemen, if you have any words of encouragement or much-earned praise for our beloved Ben Arnold, be sure to call in tomorrow to let him know…”

But Ben is waiting for Sammy in Sammy’s office at the end of the shift, the door open. He’s sitting in the old, stained spinning chair with his feet propped on the desk. The chair squeaks as Sammy passes the bathroom, and Sammy startles the way a sleeping cat does, body coiled and spinning. His hand reaches for his chest.

“Jack-in-the-Box Jesus,” Sammy mutters.

Ben’s voice is very small. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“I thought you were going home.”

Ben sighs. “I was. You know, I got to my car, put my key in an everything, but, I don’t know, man, it’s dark out, you know?” Halfway through speaking, he closes his eyes.

Sammy is quiet until he realizes that Ben is not going to speak. Sammy says, “Yeah?”

“Do you think I’m stupid?” says Ben.

“What? Of course not. Why?”

For a long time, Ben presses his lips together and looks at Sammy’s elbows. “I don’t. Um. I really don’t want to be alone.”

 _Yeah, I don’t, either,_ Sammy thinks. He says, “You gonna drink your coffee?”

“Nah. I’m mostly hoping for a peaceful sleep.”

“Got it,” says Sammy, which is the closest he can get to telling Ben the truth. He leaves the bathroom door open when he pours the coffee into the sink. “You’re hinting for an X-Files marathon, aren’t you?”

When Ben laughs, it sounds like breaking glass. He swings his legs off the desk and stands unsteadily. “You know, I wasn’t, but that sounds just about perfect.”

* * *

Sammy doesn’t tell Ben when he drives out to Libbydale Farms later that week. A gentle storm has broken over town, February frozen into flurries soft as a lover’s fingertips, and Sammy rolls his car over a light dusting of snow and the remnants of heavy tire tracks. The car spits out sporadic bursts of heat, so Sammy wears his heavy gloves. The clouds hang lower every day, the sky turning itself into an omen.

It’s the first time Sammy has ever been out to the Libbydales’, and even though there’s only one road this far from town, he cranes his neck to follow the signage.

He’s expecting a red barn, a two-story white-and-blue farmhouse with shutters and an old well pump frozen by the weather: picture-perfect Americana. He’s heard it mentioned so many times over the radio that he can envision the size of its fields, the shade of rust on its tractors, the covered porch running the length of the house. But he hasn’t imagined it dirty with snow, two cars parked in a makeshift lot beside the house (white and grey, taller and not as long as he’d imagined, draped with icicles) covered in it, the ground churned up in great scraping piles between the lane and the fields. The barn, visible behind the house, has its thin doors closed.

Sammy pulls up alongside the snowy cars and cuts the engine. He tightens the scarf around his neck and pulls his hat down before he steps out. When he looks at the house, a light comes on in its first story; seven a.m., the sun barely rising, the off-season and farmers already awake. He crosses the yard. A figure passes the window, backtracks, and waves at Sammy. Sammy waves back, grateful for the quiet greeting.

When he reaches the door, however, it creaks open. The young man who stands inside in a light fleece jacket and plaid pajama bottoms, hair dark and close to his scalp and figure altogether obscured, says, “Sammy Stevens?” His voice is light and rich.

“Don’t worry, I’m not on radio business,” Sammy replies. He recognizes the voice. “It’s Kirk, right?”

Morning and winter conspire to lower their voices. Sammy isn’t sure he can handle anything louder. Shrugging, Sammy heads over to the porch.

“Yeah, that’s me,” says Kirk. “If it’s not for the radio, what brings you up to the farm?”

“That’s a good question,” says Sammy. He climbs the low wooden steps and stands on the porch. Kirk swings the door in increments, never shutting it but clearly trying to ease the chill. “I guess I just wanted to see where it happened.”

“Hell of a night,” Kirk agrees.

Sammy reaches up and snaps an icicle off the porch roof. He considers it while Kirk talks. “For a minute there I thought it was gonna take out the whole farm, this house and everything. You know in movies when something hits the ground and skids and leaves this huge crater? I’m freezing. Want to come in?”

He’s awfully friendly, Sammy thinks, the way Jack was, quick to open up to anyone who would listen, quick to treat anyone like family.

“I’m gonna take a look around, and then we’ll see,” says Sammy. “Nice to meet you, Kirk.”

The tumult of tire tracks across the ground extends to the center of the nearest field, into the middle of a crater like the one Kirk described. Sammy can imagine broken airplane wings shooting up into the perfect, cloudless night. He can imagine a city made of metal and rainbow light, the sharp black hole, despite the party of rescuers, of its solitude. The night left empty and black. A few large chips of silver paint lay scattered beneath the snow, caught in flattened tangles or broken seedlings.

Sammy stands in the middle of the field and turns slowly, bringing it into night-black focus in his mind. He is still holding the icicle in his hand, dampening his gloves. He drops it, and it stands up like a gravestone. He fills in the empty spaces. Here the place where the body of the UFO cracked open to reveal Emily, or Tim; here the place Pete hauled his machine along the edge of the empty winter field; here three tracks of military-grade vehicles, hours later, arriving from Anderson Air Base, churning up the evidence like a broken sand castle.

For a place of fertile slumber, the place is barren and desolate. The lights from the house, more of them now, fall thin and watery away from Sammy’s feet, the sun rising as if unsure it wants to show its light to him.

He walks through the field slowly, from end to end, reimagining the scene with its proper dimensions, gloved hands in his pocket, uncaring that his feet are covering the evidence. He knows hat no one is going to be reporting on this. That the last shred of evidence fizzled away in yesterday’s tape. He’s not here for Ben.

It’s just a field, but it makes him sad. Sad for Ben, yes, and Emily, and the despair that has clouded Ben’s eyes since, but somewhere deeper and bitterer in him, too, some place ice-touched. The same place in him that took Jack’s bag back and didn’t say anything else because even then, he wasn’t ready to come out. Because Emily spilled out of an alien spacecraft and no matter what she said half a minute later, Ben was able, for a moment, to hold her hand.

Not only does Ben Arnold change the world, the world changes for Ben Arnold. And Sammy doesn’t know if it’s luck or force of personality, the power of one man, but it’s a room Sammy is shut out of. The day is dawning cold. The light catches on his eyelashes, turning them to a pale gold. He can hear voices from the farmhouse.

When the ground thaws, the Libbydales and Kirk will come out here and till the soil, and sow rows of corn seeds, and then this will just be a field, not a site of miracles but a place where something happened, once, and the world emerged from it a little bit changed.

Sammy goes back to his car and is gone long before the heating kicks in, his hands in fists against the wheel. He drives past Ben’s apartment, through the long sprawl of town, houses indistinguishable from trees, his wipers slowing as the morning breaks over King Falls.

Yes, King Falls has taken. King Falls has claws like mountain lions’, and it drags them down the faces of everyone Sammy loves.

But King Falls also gives back.

* * *

Two days after Emily is discharged from the hospital, with complete radio silence on her end and Sammy growing increasingly uncomfortable talking about her on air, now that she’s here and not a dream, Sammy drives by her place. It’s a little first-story apartment with a cute window garden, mostly barren but the hint of seedlings pushing out of hard soil and the flower box painted with a precise eye. Some of the paint is peeling off in little flecks. He doesn’t see Emily’s car in the lot; that doesn’t surprise him, given that she was taken in it.

“You can’t miss it,” said Ben. “She would have painted the walls if she could have.”

And she would have. Sammy peers in the door’s dark window, which opens to a quaint, dark hall busy with all the effects of living: heeled shoes haphazardly stored beneath a hall table adorned with dead or dying plants, windows with vibrant curtains, the skeletal outline of a kitchen still messy from baking.

It doesn’t look like Emily has come back, or if she has, she’s been too tired to tidy up. He rings the bell anyway, a sweet birdcry. He can hear the swaying of dust under the sound.

Nothing shifts inside, like the ribcage of an animal left to the woods.

He waits for a few minutes, then goes for a coffee. He sits against the window and watches life wind like a river of gold through King Falls, holding his hands around the cup until the warmth seeps out. Cars crawl by on the two-lane main street, their windows reflecting the clear sky. People in puffy coats and fashionable scarves hurry along with their heads down. The coffee shop door keeps opening, cold washing through like the ocean at night, and it leaves Sammy breathing shakily into his cup.

It’s so mundane, so routine, yet it’s something Emily almost lost forever—another winter in King Falls—and something Jack, with his sunny upbringing and his sunny second life, might never see.

“Okay,” he says to his coffee. “If you were Emily Potter, where would you be?” Emily is not displaced, as Jack would be, so she must have someone to stay with. A family member.

It takes him a long time to track down Emily’s mother. By the time the assistant librarian gives him the address, he is bracing himself for the hurt. He is bracing himself to see the ghost in Emily’s hands, behind Emily’s eyes.

Emily’s mother’s house is low and many-windowed, well-maintained but plain in appearance. A middle-aged woman with a long grey braid opens the door. Her voice is low and sweet. “Hello?”

“Hi,” says Sammy, and it sounds weak in his ears. “Are you Mrs. Potter?”

She narrows her eyes, as though deciding on something. “Yeah. I guess you’re a friend of Emily’s.”

“Yeah. I’m Sammy Stevens. Up at King Falls AM?”

Something goes dark in her face.

“Is everything all right?” he asks.

“Sure, sure. It’s just, I’m not sure it’s a good idea, Emily talking to you.”

Oh. Sammy studies the woman, her eyes darker than Emily’s, her skin a few shades paler. The bags under her eyes look as deep as Ben’s.

“I’m not… is this about the Ben thing?”

“This is about a lot of things,” she informs him. “My girl’s dealing with a lot, and—”

“You don’t want to bring up bad memories,” says Sammy. “I get it.”

“I don’t want to trigger anything. She’s my girl.”

He bites his lip. He bites the ghost back from the tips of his teeth. “It must have been hard for you, to have us up at the station dragging it back up all the time.”

“I try not to listen.”

There’s some shifting behind the woman—a heavy thud; a sharp, high swear; the patter of footsteps—and Emily comes to the door, holding a book between her fingers and shaking one leg, as though she’d stubbed a toe in rising. Emily’s dark hair is longer than the last time Sammy saw her, drawn back into a heavy ponytail, and her eyes look flat as stained glass. She stands like a fairy on her tiptoes. She has a pencil behind her ear. Her pajama bottoms show cartoon seals striking various poses, while her shirt, its collar stretched from years of use, reads _I LIKE BIG BOOKS AND I CANNOT LIE._

She stares at Sammy for a long time, her brows drawn into an intelligent, calculating look. “I couldn’t help but overhear,” she says. “You’re from the radio station?”

Emily’s mother shoots a hard stare at Sammy.

“Uh, yeah,” says Sammy. “But I’m not on radio business.”

“That’s probably for the best,” says Emily’s mother. Emily wedges herself into the space between her mother and the doorframe.

Emily says, “Let me just get changed, and I’d love to talk to you.”

She takes the pencil from behind her ear and sticks it in her book, handing the whole thing to her mother. She runs up the stairs with a teenager’s energy, her swinging hair brushing the walls. When Sammy transfers his gaze to Mrs. Potter, the woman is shaking her head.

“Always been a handful, that girl,” she says, her voice both warm and apprehensive.

While Emily changes, her mother leads Sammy out to the back porch, wide and hooded, enclosed by scratched glass. There’s a pair of antique wooden skis fixed to the wall and a few potted herbs in the corners. The midday sun casts it in a perfect shadow, the woods beyond shimmering. A few hours and the town will be as hot as the day gets, but Sammy keeps his coat zipped. He sits on a worn wicker chair, lifting a heavy blanket and setting it on the floor. He studies the woods, the short slope of tangled grass and the sudden rise of thorny, barren undergrowth. He checks his phone, but Ben hasn’t messaged him since they arrived at the station that morning, which could mean anything.

The screen door bangs shut behind Emily, the heavy wooden one slower on its tail. In her snow boots, she stomps over to the chair opposite Sammy and sits, the same book clutched to her chest. Sammy sees that it’s a complete _Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy._

“Let me guess. Third time reading that?”

“Second,” says Emily. “But the last time, I was a teenager, and it’s nice to read a comfort series, if you will.”

The ghost stares out of Emily’s face, its grin sharp in her teeth while she busies her hands with the worn pages of the book, with her heavy skirt.

“I swear I’ve read half a dozen books in the past three days,” she says, laughing, carefully sidestepping what lies beyond those days. Something about her seems unbearably fragile, like light on snow. Something that accounts for the silence, the sequestration, the way she tiptoed around her mother’s house like a cat in a thunderstorm.

“I didn’t want to say anything in front of my mom,” says Emily, “but if you’re from the station, then maybe you can explain what’s going on.”

“You know,” says Sammy slowly, still turning his mind over Emily’s mother’s odd behavior, “I’m not so sure I can.”

Emily’s face falls. Her voice is soft. “You don’t think I can handle it.”

He doesn’t want to overwhelm her, but as he’s about to say so, Mrs. Potter opens both the back doors and says, “You two want anything? Grilled cheese, Em?”

Emily brightens. She swings around and says, “I don’t think it’s fair to have lunch without… um, without our guest having anything.”

“It’s okay,” says Sammy.

Mrs. Potter doesn’t seem in a hurry to invite Sammy to stay, but Emily levels her with the same insistent eyes she used on Ben all the time, but she grumbles about making them tea and lets the door fall closed.

 _Our guest,_ Sammy thinks. There’s an introduction in order.

“You, um, saw my co-host, Ben Arnold when…”

“I don’t really know what happened then,” Emily says, her voice so far away. “I remember Troy, and a sky full of stars. I feel like I should know you. I feel like I do know you?”

“I’m Sammy,” he says gently. The ghost hands his heart a shovel, says _dig._ “Stevens. I met you when I’d just moved to town.”

She turns back around, but she looks at the book, at her heavy magenta skirt, not at him. “Where did you move from?”

She does not know the taboo of asking, does not know the way his heart thuds like a rabbit’s foot without the luck. His breath comes out heavy.

When he speaks, his voice is rough and soft. Without being able to say why, he knows he owes this woman. “Uh, California. Los Angeles.”

“You must have had a house nicer than this one. You know, you don’t realize how rich your parents’ houses are until you get old enough to get your own.”

Sammy laughs the way you only can if you’re trying not to cry. All those windows, and Jack standing in front of them. Jack looking out of them. Jack’s fingerprints up and down them, an invisible relic that will remain long after all their things are packed away and Sammy finally sells the place. “Yeah. It was pretty nice.”

She sighs.

He says, “What else do you remember, Emily?”

She sets the heavy book on her chair arm and presses two fingers to her forehead. “It’s really… um, it’s hazy? It’s in my head, sometimes, as this, like, pale, floating light. And then it’s gone. It’s… this is going to sound silly, but I feel like a lot of things aren’t coming through. Like tangled wires, I guess, or cut wires, actually. Like, I look at you and I think I should know you, not that I do, like time is scrambled up in my head, and… and I’m rambling.”

“It’s okay,” says Sammy, when what he wants to say is, _I’m sorry._ Even clad in bold magenta, something about her feels so pale, white as a tooth, slipping through his fingers the way light does. There is no evidence. He had seen to that. There is nothing she can listen to, nothing to say irrevocably, _This is how it went._ He has come without proof, without anything to give her but more doubt. “It’s okay to take your time. To do what’s best for you. I just want you to know that you always have friends at King Falls AM, on or off the air.”

“Thanks,” says Emily, and he can hear the smile in her voice.

They sit in silence for some time, during which Sammy begins to wonder how much he has to say to this Emily Potter and why the loss of history should make such a difference. He says, “Have you ever heard of—”

“Yes?” says Emily.

“I’m sorry,” says Sammy. _A guy named Jack._ She should know something about ghosts. “I didn’t mean to say that.”

He leaves before tea is ready. Emily sees him to the door. Her mother glances up from her newspaper at the kitchen table, and Sammy wonders, briefly, whether the tea was just a ruse to eavesdrop.

“Bye, Sammy,” says Emily on the front steps. “It means a lot, you dropping by.” She shifts like a mirage, like a ghost, in front of him. She reaches out to shake his hand and pulls hers back at once.

“Call me if you need anything,” says Sammy.

Emily’s smile looks too unsure to be a smile.

The door closes, and he’s left with the chasm of Emily’s unremembering, but maybe some of it is his own, after all.

* * *

Sammy spends a lot of time at Ben’s in the weeks that follow. He has been avoiding his own apartment, the single bed and the bathroom empty and only steamed up after his own showers, the dishes piled in his sink; he spends a lot of time in his car, driving to the edge of town or window shopping down Main Street or reading horrible memoirs from the library about people who can’t write and are making everything up. Ben needs the company—Ben could use company 24/7; Sammy’s not willing to give him that—and Sammy needs a distraction.

He doesn’t tell this to Ben, but Ben has a gaming console hooked up to his TV and enough woes of his own. He makes it easy for Sammy to deflect.

Sammy doesn’t say a word about the new scars on his legs, or not-quite-scars. He doesn’t say a thing about the ring in its velvet box he sits in his car and stares at but can’t bring himself to open. He gives himself this moment of weakness, these silent mornings. He makes room for one week of self-indulgence. He tells himself he can crawl back into the King Falls sunrise like anybody else, and mostly he does.

But sometimes something in the back of Sammy’s head rings like a smoke alarm at the sight of Ben. How many nights has Sammy lost sleep over Ben’s scrawled handwriting, _WHO IS SAMMY STEVENS?_ How many times has he angled to see Ben’s phone screen during idle moments? Sammy knows exactly where his name is online, exactly how easy it would be for Ben to find it. He knows who that name is attached to, no matter how careful he and Jack were. He knows what Ben would find, were he to know what to look for.

The ghost is beginning to settle into the corners of his car, the crevasses of his apartment, like dust stirred by a frenetic cat. It has fingers like fishbones, which it draws down his arms in the shower. The ghost creeps lower, so Sammy touches himself, pretends his hands are Jack’s hands and sits on the bathroom floor feeling ill and empty when he’s done.

Ben’s apartment gets messier as the weeks go on. Dishes pile in the sink and all along the counters, while clothes pile across the living room and hallway. Those first few days, Sammy feels like he’s acting a pantomime for Ben: following Ben through the house, picking up the messes and putting them away. It’s understandable, he tells himself, and it gives him something to do.

He keeps his eye steadily on Ben. He knows what to look for.

He tells Ben, “You can’t blame yourself,” anyway, while Ben is hollering at MarioKart.

He tells Ben, “It wasn’t your fault,” while the pasta water runs over.

He tells Ben, “Not many men can change the world before they’re forty,” and Ben laughs.

When Ben shrugs and says, “I know,” his voice is flat as paper.

Other than that, they don’t talk about Emily.

One day, Sammy says, “You know, this all looks a lot like grief.”

The hollows under Ben’s eyes have gone from startling to normal. Ben pauses the game. Leaving Sammy on the couch, he crosses to the bright vivarium in the corner of the room, almost as tall as him, and slides open the door. The sugar glider inside, dark-eyed as Ben, skitters across a branch to brush against Ben’s fingers. Ben laughs an uncomplicated laugh.

“Come out,” he coos as he lifts Peas up, tail swinging in the open air. “There you go.” He strokes Peas’ long, soft back, transfers the glider gently from hand to hand.

Leaving the viv door open, Ben turns back to Sammy. “Maybe it is. But I don’t think… it’s not really my place to call it that. Grief.”

“Sure it is,” says Sammy. “You lost someone.”

Something flashes in Ben’s eyes.

Sammy continues, “Someone doesn’t have to — she doesn’t have to die for you to have lost something. Hell, even breakups are their own form of grief.”

“If only it were a breakup,” mutters Ben. “That simple, that… expected.”

“I know there’s no script for this.”

“Stop it, okay? Stop saying you know.”

It is getting harder to look up at Ben. “Okay. But it’s okay that it hurts.”

“It shouldn’t,” says Ben, voice plaintive. “I’m… I’m supposed to be happy. It’s supposed to be enough. And it isn’t, so does that make me a bad person? Does that make me selfish?”

“No,” says Sammy steadily.

Ben sits back on the sofa and Sammy reaches over to stroke Peas’ back.

“Can I ask you,” says Sammy. He wants Ben to know that he understands.

“Yeah?” says Ben, his voice soft with the promise of Sammy’s revelation. Their hands brush along Peas’ flank.

And Sammy can’t say it. “Oh. I had a friend, that’s all. And someone he loved packed everything and took the car and left. Didn’t say a word.” He doesn’t say, _And it was my fault,_ but it’s there. Jack’s eyes shut like a car door, Jack’s eyes quick as a highway at night. Jack barely talking to him.

When Sammy glances up, Ben’s mouth is a little _o._ He can’t say it.

“Of course I can’t imagine what you’re going through. But I’ve seen something like it before. And—” Sammy laughs “—you’re doing better than him already. I think he sleepwalked through a whole year.”

“It’s just,” says Ben slowly, his eyes fever-dark. “It’s like, I spent all that time on, well, on the notebook, and I just—”

“You don’t know what to do with yourself,” says Sammy. He knows Ben is deflecting, and lets him.

“Don’t laugh.”

“No, I get it, I do, I…” Sammy falls quiet. He knows because he spent months pacing an empty house, as though by measuring it in strides he could measure the size of Jack’s life. “It’s understandable, that’s all. Things in motion tend to stay in motion.”

Ben crosses the living room and, holding Peas securely against his chest, sits back on the sofa. “I freaking love you,” he tells Peas. To Sammy, he says, “And if there’s nothing to move toward? What am I supposed to do then?”

The ghost climbs into Sammy’s lap, almost as heavy as a person. The ghost chatters in Peas’ voice, that sharp and barking hiss, animal in its absence.

“Well, then,” says Sammy, “I suppose it’s time to keep living.”

They sit side-by-side for a long time, connected by Peas and words turned to ghosts in the stuffy air.

Ben murmurs, “You good, Sammy?”

The long, slow tumble of the UFO through a sky as bright and busy as Los Angeles during Pride. The empty field pale with snow like a baptism, still fertile for the next season’s harvest. Ben’s eyes redder each time Sammy sees him. A girl with a voice soft and thin, a girl with a girl’s voice saying, _Who are you?_

A town that, sometimes, like a miracle, gives back.

It’s something to hold onto. Something to tell the ghost when it won’t let him sleep.

Sammy says, “You know, Ben, I think I will be.”


End file.
